A wee tale, with apologies in advance for the TMI. [corrected version as of 10am Eastern]

THE BODY IS THE SOUL #2. All was fun and comfortable and comforting, I thought, but my bladder begged to differ.

I’d taken myself over to the local urgent care facility and, having seen the doctor, was waiting in the exam room to hear the results of the urinalysis. I was certain it would show evidence of a UTI. It was the summer of 2016 and I was in the process of breaking up a successful, growing business—my first consistently profitable self-employment venture—because my partner had turned out to be a total disaster in his personal finances. I’d made the error of paying myself too little from the start, and now I found my responsibilities ballooning at the same time that my partner—an obvious spendthrift with zero budgeting skills—was crying poverty and demanding a bigger cut of our proceeds. I’d been experiencing sleeplessness, heart palpitations, and bursts of anger, but for some reason I still assumed my bladder issues were an unrelated matter of infection, a purely physiological thing.

The doctor came in after a brief absence and said, “Tell me again, you’re in the middle of a crisis, right?”

“Um, yeah.” I laughed.

“Because here’s the thing. Your urine is pristine.”

What? I made a sound halfway between laughter and despair. It turned out that the thirty or so bathroom visits I’d been making during the daytime hours, and the additional three or four or seven at night—that nonstop sensation of urgency and distraction—had no bacterial or fungal cause.

“You’re telling me this is just stress?”

As if I weren’t already so…pissed off by my soon-to-be-ex business partner, now I was annoyed at my own body, too.

Photo by Ricky Rew on Unsplash

If memory serves, the phantom UTI vanished the moment I knew it was psychosomatic. Apparently, my mind still held some small authoritative advantage over the rest of me.

Last April, I made some new friends in California, a straight married couple, just about my age, who'd attended a solo house concert I gave in Palm Springs and became fans. This past December, they invited me to their beautiful desert town apartment. It was a brief break during a month in which I was mostly alone and managing the care of my dying mother. I left my hotel in San Bernardino and arrived mid-morning to begin a meandering three-way conversation that went on for hours. Knowing my stressed-out state, my new friends insisted on pampering me. We had an early lunch just before a massage therapist showed up to give us each a 90-minute session out on their back patio. They had me go first and they refused to let me pay. The masseuse turned out to be a fellow musician with strong, capable hands. With my flesh and fascia expertly restored, I then had time to take a private naked soak in the jacuzzi, in the landlord's sculpture- and mosaic-filled backyard. Later we had lasagna for dinner and made cocktails with the bourbon I brought along. At bedtime, my friends unfurled a super thick Japanese futon for me in their living room and flipped on some dark purple night lights. I'd had some wine and a CBD gummy and was as relaxed as possible.

I should mention something here. I'm an easy traveler, low maintenance, self-sufficient, spontaneous, highly adaptable. I'm also the kind of person who makes new friends without much effort under normal circumstances. For me, assimilating into a strange new household for 24 hours would not pose any anxiety. I enjoy that sense of falling in with new people.

Almost everything about the visit had been fun, comforting, and healing. At a certain point, late into the night after her husband had already crashed, the woman got a sudden inspiration and proposed a tech startup idea to me, involving some digital marketing protocols I already know something about and a specific market she already knows something about. She wasn't looking for a partner. It was, she said, an idea she dreamed up a while back but didn't have time, energy, or desire to pursue herself. She would whiteboard the business model for me. I could run with it, and then I could eventually send 5% of my profits back to her, 25% if I sold the company outright.

It was late at night and the booze plus gummy combination had rendered me a bit aphasic. My new friend spoke volubly about the business idea, which certainly seemed an interesting one—for somebody. She didn't badger me, but against my quietude, she was somewhat aggressive in her enthusiasm. I don't mean to say I mistrusted her or thought she had anything but the best intentions. I just didn't believe her idea was a good fit for me. When I pulled out of my high long enough to find some words, I told her it didn't sound like my kind of thing. She backed off without offense, and then it was time to sleep.

The next morning, though, it was I who brought it up again and I who heard myself asking questions about the business specifics. What can I say? I have an entrepreneur's dreamy side. But something else was happening. The need to pee thing again, bladder contractions arriving every 15 minutes or so, despite the fact that I'd rung myself out after my first coffee.

At that moment, I wanted deny what seemed both obvious and too mystical. Actually, I blamed the gummy. There is a hypothesis that since cannabidiol affects your serotonin levels, those in turn may affect your urinary system, although it doesn't seem as if there's clear evidence yet. Packing up and saying my goodbyes, I assumed I'd need to hang on for dear life on the highway but make a grocery trip for cranberry juice just before arriving back in San Bernardino. I genuinely expected to need a dozen pit stops.

You can guess what happened instead, can't you? Nothing. The moment I left my lovely hosts, my bladder ceased its yellow alert and returned to its normal operational state. I drove 90 minutes west on the I-10 without urgency. Maybe it was just the gummy. Maybe the gummy’s effect had coincidentally worn off at the exact moment I got in my car and drove away. A mere matter of timing.

In terms of what causes a false sense of urinary urgency, there seems to be far more evidence for stress itself rather than weed or its ancillary products, at least from my very quick web research on the matter.¹ Although the effect is more pronounced in cases of chronic stress over time, it's been shown that in certain acute situations, the pituitary gland releases a neurotransmitter called CRF or corticotrophin-releasing factor. This is the stuff that makes you want to gooooo.

But this is what interests me. Unlike the glaring crisis I'd endured with my business partner, here I was having a lovely time with new friends and I did not consciously register stress. I was taking in all the good stuff, the crayon-colored sunset, the bright desert air, the painted mosaic tiles and sculptures everywhere, the massage therapist's intense lavender oil, and the homemade lasagna we had for dinner. My body should have been very pleased, but the phantom pee alarm bell was telling me something else.

Here's a clue. Last I checked. I'm not a submissive laboratory mouse, but in one study I found, increased bladder activity was seen in such creatures who were exposed to more dominant and aggressive mice.² My California hosts seemed anything but dominant or aggressive. On the contrary, and somewhat sad to say, they, as I put it, pampered me in a way that I've never been pampered before. And yet late at night when I was drunk and stoned and not quite able to speak, this very voluble and insistent new woman friend had gone on and on…and on about this startup idea that truly did not feel like a good fit.

I knew it for sure late that night, but in the morning I tried to forget that I knew it for sure and even hinted that she and I should discuss it again in the near future.

But I'll tell you something, all desire or interest or curiosity in this woman's well-intentioned but inappropriate vision for my life pretty much evaporated just as quickly as my expected need to go buy cranberry juice.

I'd known what I knew and I still knew it. I also knew—after the company shut down and several other less dramatic business partnerships that went nowhere—that I was never again going to collaborate on somebody else's idea. I know me. I like my own ideas. At this age, they are the only ideas that have the power to motivate me. My bladder, I think, knows this too and was just trying to keep me honest.

Lesson relearned: listen to your body, even in its humblest functions.

1. Watch a Urologist Explain Why You Need to Pee When You're Nervous

2. Social stress induces changes in urinary bladder function, bladder NGF content, and generalized bladder inflammation in mice